The NHS treats illness. Who creates health?

A case for creativity as the missing infrastructure of neighbourhood health Forty-three sites. The biggest reimagining of community health in a generation. But here's the question no one in the programme is asking loudly enough: what actually changes how people feel, connect and recover in their neighbourhoods? A growing body of international evidence points to something the NHS has never quite known what to do with: creativity. Not arts on prescription. Not a mural in a waiting room. Creativity as core infrastructure for health. Bradford - UK City of Culture 2025 and a Wave 1 Neighbourhood Health site - has embedded creative health across more than 30 social prescribing projects in what its organisers describe as the biggest single-year local authority investment of its kind in the UK. This session makes the case that neighbourhood health without creativity will simply relocate clinical thinking into community settings, and that the sites willing to embed arts, culture and creative practice into their model will be the ones that actually transform health and wellbeing outcomes for their populations.